I'm in a bit of a dilemna trying to book a flight DCA-XXX-YVR as a positioning flight for a *A award flight. My options:

Option 1. US DCA-PHX-YVR in Y which is currently pricing out at close to $900 () for my needed dates. Lowest I've seen is $700. The outbound and return flights would both be around 7:00 am, which is probably more painful on the way home as we'll be on our way back from Auckland and even with a night spent in YVR, it's still going to be unpleasant waking up for that flight.

Advantage: I've been planning on using my US MC companion certs to get the price down; at the current pricing I'd get us both to YVR and back for about $1200 with the taxes. Even if the fare comes down (it's been all over the place since I started watching it), it's probably not going to get below about $600 for the first ticket + $99 companion ticket + taxes.

The other advantage is I can wait a while to book. But I have lost the upgrade lottery while positioning for long-haul award travel and it really sucks to step off that fancy J cabin on whichever carrier, and go sit in coach for 7 hours.

It is in Y and while we're both CP I am not confident on the upgrade coming through at least for DCA-PHX for 2.

Option 2. AC DCA-YYZ-YVR in F. AC is having a little sale that includes Executive First (for once). Even with the sale it's about $1300 a.i. per person. There are better choices on the itineraries and we could take the outbound at around 10am and the return around 11 or noon (need to look at the schedules again). So we'd be looking at $2600 a.i. for a better itinerary and guaranteed F seating. We'd be in a traditional domestic F config on the outbound and the International config on the return (AC's pods and layflat beds, but we're taking those to/from SYD too so the lhaving ayflat beds is not a show-stopper).

Mileage or at least PQM on either itinerary is pretty close: 6k for the US itinerary, or 6700 for the AC itinerary including the COS benefit.

My big concern with this option, other than the price, is that the award trip is not till June; I doubt AC will drop their daily YVR-SYD service but if there is some scheduling change, I might have to spend more money to get things sorted. We are building 2-3 days in YVR into the itin on the outbound and 1 on the return which hopefully mitigates this. But the AC sale only goes till the 11th so I'd need to buy quickly.

I know nobody can make financial decisions for me--- it's my money, my budget, and I won't spend in exactly the same way as another person will. I just wanted to see what other people would decide to do if they were in the same situation. Would you go with the US flight, using the certificates to get the price down by $1k or more, or go with the AC flight, spend a fairly big chunk of extra money in exchange for guaranteed F and 3 more hours of sleep?